Product Owner - #1785097

As Kaboodle moves into its next phase of rapid growth, we're looking for an amazing Product Owner to join our team to help deliver our product strategy.

We’re looking for someone to join the team developing our API platform to underpin all our Frontend UI developments and third party integrations.

We’re midway through a journey of migrating Clients from our old tech to our new one; many are successfully migrated, for some we still have some building to do.  In the initial term your focus will be on supporting this migration, as well as reviewing performance and opportunities to then evolve the new platform.

Why Kaboodle?

You’ll own a platform that is the heart of every Kaboodle customer journey. Your decisions will empower our squads, client developers, and millions of end users. Join us and shape the API that powers it all.

Who are you:

You are a creative thinker and collaborator with 5 years or more experience working in a PO role, preferably with experience of defining and delivering APIs.  You approach what you do proactively and confidently, making connections and building relationships across the business that give us the best understanding of our user requirements and goals.

You Will:

Product Vision & Strategic Alignment

• Work with Senior Product, Technical and Business stakeholders to understand and support the product vision and strategic goals
• Help shape and maintain an outcome-driven roadmap covering endpoint expansion & versioning.
• Shape and evangelise an API-first product vision aligned with Kaboodle’s Goals

Stakeholder & Business Collaboration

• Serve as the bridge between business stakeholders and engineering squads, translating commercial goals and business rules into precise API definitions for both internal and external users
• Communicate the roadmap, priorities, and trade-offs to stakeholders, securing buy-in and ensuring transparency.
• Influence, persuade and negotiate at all levels; effectively communicate status, progress and plans to create a shared understanding
• Ensure planning and reporting provides transparency and visibility of plans and progress to business stakeholders
• Drive and support colleagues to roll out and introduce new features to Clients
• Identify and manage stakeholder groups to align interests, resolve conflict and keep the business moving down the best path
• Foster innovation within your product area, helping nurture new ideas and bring them to life

Backlog Ownership & Agile Execution

• Author epics and user stories that include payload schemas, success metrics and non-functional requirements (rate limits, auth flows, SLAs).
• Lead backlog refinement with engineers, QA and DevOps—ensuring stories are ready with mock payloads, test data and acceptance criteria.
• Guide and support your squad during sprints, communicate with colleagues on progress, risks and issues, and engage with them for support on UAT and Go To Market activities
• Work on multiple initiatives simultaneously, balancing focus according to priorities and return on investment.
• Validate each release, working with stakeholders as required, in staging before green-lighting production deploys.
• Foster and Drive continuous improvement

Customer-Centric Development & Market Awareness

• Conduct market & user research; using insight and data to drive the decision-making process
• Engage with internal SMEs to maintain a good knowledge of our Client base and their expectations
• Works with the Squad and Devops teams teams to improve performance, reliability and overall product experience.
• Ensure features and enhancements are validated through real-world usage, customer testing, and continuous feedback loops.

What we’re looking for:

• API-Savvy Product Owner – 5+ years as a Product Owner/Manager, owning public or partner APIs within a SaaS or e-commerce environment
• Establishing security best practices: OAuth 2.0 flows, rate limiting, scopes, GDPR considerations.
• Experience of e-Commerce or transaction-heavy platforms and an understanding of payment, basket, and order APIs.
• Managing versioning, backwards-compatibility and deprecation policies
• Pro-active and Confident in driving forward the vision for a product and stand up for the vision when managing conflicting demands from multiple sets of business users
• Strong time management and the drive to champion and achieve committed goals
• Experience of working with non-technical business users to define/re-define business rules and requirements and design APIs to meet those requirements
• A collaborative working approach to creating great product solutions to customer problems
• Excellent stakeholder management across all levels
• A practical understanding of Agile development methodologies including Scrum
• Proven experience of product requirements story writing
• Championing and developing internal processes within and outside of the Development team

We are currently working mostly remote, with teams heading to our office in Ancoats around six times per month for specific, collaborative meetings that are more effective in person. For the rest of the time we value flexibility and are trusted to work from wherever we feel most productive.

Kaboodle is committed to building an inclusive company where we can all be ourselves while we work together. Our hiring decisions are based on skills and experience, regardless of your race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability status or anything else. If there’s anything you think we should know for us to support you in participating in the interview process, please let us know in your application. We are also a Real Living Wage Employer. By paying the real Living Wage, we are voluntarily taking a stand to ensure our team can earn a wage which is enough to live on.

Our Benefits

25 days annual leave, increasing to 26 days after 2 years service and 27 days after 3 years service

Health Shield Cash Plan (Level 2)

Cycle-to-work scheme

Guestlist for shows & festivals

Penfold Pension - 3% at enrolment, increasing to 4% after 2 years and 5% after 3 years

Critical Illness Cover

Group Life Cover (Death in Service)

Personal Development Budget

£20 Monthly wellbeing allowance